Summary
Jenicca is originally from Mauritius, an island found on the east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. She started with a Bachelor’s degree in South Africa at the Nelson Mandela University, then made her way to the University of Cape Town for a Masters in Ecological Statistics where she joined the SEEC - Centre for Statistics in Ecology, Environment and Conservation: a research group within the Department of Statistical Sciences at the University of Cape Town. She then switched to behavior ecology and completed a second Master’s in Interdisciplinary Ecology (2019–2021) from the University of Florida where her work focused on reproducibility of scientific papers in movement ecology. She is now a researcher with the United States Geological Survey (USGS).
More details on my past research projects can be found below.
Reseach Experience
| 2019-2021 | Master Thesis at University of Florida (Gainesville, Florida, USA) |
|---|---|
| Subject | A Glimpse into the Reproducibility of Scientific Papers in Movement Ecology: How are we doing? |
| Supervisors | Dr. Mathieu Basille and Dr. Rocío Joo Arakawa |
| Description | Reproducibility is the earmark of science and thus Movement Ecology as well. However, studies in disciplines such as biology and geosciences have shown that published work is rarely reproducible. Ensuring reproducibility is not a mandatory part of the research process and thus there are no clear procedures in place to assess the reproducibility of scientific articles. In this study, a reproducibility workflow scoring sheet is put forward. The workflow is based on six criteria that lead to successful reproducible papers. |
| 2017-2018 | Master Thesis at University of Cape Town (Cape Town, South Africa) |
|---|---|
| Subject | Modelling the Range-wide Density Patterns of the Arthroleptella lightfooti using acoustic Monitoring Data |
| Supervisors | Prof. Res Altwegg, Dr. Ian Durbach and Dr. John Measey |
| Description | Species distributions are often limited by environmental factors and according to the abundant-center hypothesis, abundance should be highest where the environment is most favourable for the species. So, do the same environmental factors determine occurrence and abundance patterns inside the range? This question is examined using Arthroleptella lightfooti, a species of frog endemic to the mountains of the Cape Peninsula, South Africa. |
| 2016 | Bachelor Thesis at Nelson Mandela University (Port Elizabeth, South Africa) |
|---|---|
| Subject | Uncovering the latent movement states and predicting kill-sites of lions using Hidden Markov models |
| Supervisors | Dr. Victoria Goodall |
| Description | The objectives of this project were to evaluate whether HMMs can predict observer-confirmed kill sites from GPS lion relocation data and also provide additional insight into lion behavior. |